"Cartography in the European Enlightenment" goes to press!

Matthew Edney

I know I said that I wasn't going to do news thingies on this oh-so-academic blog, but I cannot miss the opportunity to announce that Cartography in the European Enlightenment, Volume Four of The History of Cartography, was sent to the University of Chicago Press on 2 January 2018. It comprises about one million words and 954 full-color images in 479 entries by 207 contributors.

This is a huge beastie:

Photo by Beth Freundlich, project manager of the History of Cartography Project

The ruler in Beth Freundlich's picture isn't absolutely clear, but the print out of the volume is 15.5 inches high.

Mary Pedley and I are very grateful to our contributors, to our associate editors, and to the staff of the History of Cartography Project who have rigorously checked everything. Jude Leimer, the Project's managing editor, has been crucial to this entire process; thanks, Jude!

Volume Four, in effect, turns the structure of the History on its side. Readers who have seen Volume Six (Cartography in the Twentieth Century, 2015) will be familiar with the encyclopedic format and the manner in which each of the encyclopedic volumes are organized by a variety of representational, social, and technical contexts. Volume Four makes this design much clearer. So, whereas in Volume Three (Cartography in the European Renaissance, 2007) most of the content was organized by national tradition and then by type of mapping, in Volume Four, the detailed content is largely organized by type of mapping and then by national context. This means that readers will be able to read entries about, say, marine charting or property mapping grouped together so that they can draw new insights about how similar functions of mapping were carried out in similar or different ways across Europe and its colonies. (Getting all the different groups of entries to "fit together" without excessive duplication or significant gaps has taken up a lot of Mary's and my time!)

It will take some time for such a beastie to work it's way through copy editing, galleys, color proofs, page proofs, indexing, and then printing, but our Press editors think that printed books mights be available for the next International Conference on the History of Cartography, to be held in Amsterdam in July 2019.

For more information about the Project, go to its website: https://geography.wisc.edu/histcart/. If you would like to support the Project's preparation of Volume Five, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, then please follow the prominent "Make a Gift" link.

"Like" the History of Cartography Project on FaceBook to follow the volume through production.

Of the published volumes in the series, Volumes One through Three are available online for free access: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/index.html. (Volume Six, Cartography in the Twentieth Century will go online probably in June 2018.)